


being alive

by basementhero



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Human Niall, M/M, Vampire Harry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-03
Updated: 2016-08-03
Packaged: 2018-07-29 00:49:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7663786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/basementhero/pseuds/basementhero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s around the third club of the night that Liam apparently lets the AB positive get to his head, and he starts spewing nonsense like he thinks he’s got a daytime talk show on the telly or something.</p>
<p>“You should shack up with someone, mate,” he declares, completely ruining Harry’s attempts to make eye contact with a decent-looking woman across the room who looks like she’d be easy to woo into the back alley. </p>
<p>(or: Harry has been undead long enough to know that relationships are a waste of time.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	being alive

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by "Being Alive" from the musical Company.

It’s around the third club of the night that Liam apparently lets the AB positive get to his head, and he starts spewing nonsense like he thinks he’s got a daytime talk show on the telly or something.

“You should shack up with someone, mate,” he declares, completely ruining Harry’s attempts to make eye contact with a decent-looking woman across the room who looks like she’d be easy to woo into the back alley.

Harry glares at him dangerously, his eyes flashing red under the strobe lights. Liam isn’t fazed by it, just grins with his fangs poking out where anyone could see them. Harry has to keep himself from physically forcing Liam’s mouth shut. For a centuries-old creature of the night, Liam is surprisingly daft and childish. Harry, on the other hand, is the perfect level of aloof and disillusioned, full of wisdom and bitterness. He might’ve left Liam years ago to go about his business alone if he didn’t feel like he owed his life to the man. Liam had found him when he was just a few days old, mind shrouded in a haze of bloodlust and pain, and taught him how to deal with the thirst, how to take just enough from several people to leave all parties involved alive. Just because he’s resigned himself to at least a few more decades of companionship with Liam doesn’t mean that he’s learned not to be irritated by him.

“You’re mad,” Harry intones, removing all trace of emotion from his face. It’s best not to react when Liam gets on strange fixations like this. It’s all over much faster if Harry doesn’t play along.

“I’m serious,” Liam insists, dropping his fist a bit too hard onto the tabletop. Luckily, the music is so loud that no one notices the slam. “You need a lover, Styles. Someone to take on romantic walks during the day and make love to at night.”

“There are several problems with that, Liam,” Harry rolls his eyes. He doesn’t want to be dragged into this nonsense but it’s hard to ignore, especially when the only other thing for him to focus on is how hungry he still is—even after two sessions with drunkenly willing girls who’d barely noticed him biting them and drinking until they passed out. “One, where am I meant to go on romantic walks when I can’t go out in the sun?”

“Wear sunscreen.”

“Two,” Harry continues, pretending that he hadn’t heard the other man’s technically useful solution, “I’m dead. _We’re_ dead. No one wants to date a dead man.”

“ _Un_ dead, really.”

“And three, I don’t _want_ a lover.”

“The obvious answer here, mate, is date another vampire.”

Harry grimaces. He can count on one hand the number of other vampires he finds tolerable, and on one finger the number he’s willing to spend more than an hour with. Vampires are a disjointed group, not so much a unified entity as some human literature would have one believe. The main issue is that they all come from different eras, different places; the only thing they have in common is immortality and sucking blood, which doesn’t leave a lot of conversation topics. Harry can only stand a few minutes of debate over fresh versus bagged before he gets incredibly bored and considers finding the nearest wooden stake to impale himself on.

Unlike a lot of his kind, Harry tries his best to stay caught up on human affairs. He doesn’t insist on continuing to wear the clothing he died in and pretending that society hasn’t moved forward. He has an iPhone and watches Doctor Who whilst sat naked on his sofa with takeaway and cheap wine. He has a job—albeit one he works from home and has to change every few years to avoid suspicion—and pays his tax, takes the Tube, listens to current music. He doesn’t have quite so many unsolicited opinions about celebrities’ lives and refuses to partake in the phenomena of “selfies,” but he does have a Twitter account on which all of his two followers can see his black and white photos.

“You’re lonely, mate. It’s pathetic. You need someone.”

Harry stands up from the table and smooths out the minute wrinkles in his shirt. He doesn’t refute Liam’s claims, lets his back do it for him as he turns and walks away.

He’s not lonely, he insists in his head over the next few weeks. There’s nothing to be lonely about. He’s around people all the time, in the streets, in pubs, up against a wall as he sinks his teeth into another dubiously willing human. If for some reason he needs to actually speak to someone, he has Liam. If he needs sex, he’s more than attractive enough to entice someone to sleep with him. There’s nothing to gain from romance, nothing to counterbalance everything he’d stand to lose—his space, his peaceful solitude, his time.

He sees couples sitting on park benches, sees them holding hands and leaning into each other, and he doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want someone clinging to him and expecting him to look cute and infatuated to passers-by. He doesn’t want to be like the teenagers playing footsie under the table at cafés or the pensioners hobbling along together, taking in the scenery. He doesn’t want to have to change himself, to have to be nice and polite and considerate all the time, always wary of hurting the hypothetical someone’s feelings and looking like an asshole. He doesn’t want to make room in his closet and dresser and bathroom cabinets for someone else’s things. He doesn’t want someone’s smug little grin when they put the right amount of sugar in his tea or find a record he’s been looking for. He doesn’t want someone to think they _know_ him, to think they fit into his world and complete him or something. He’s a whole person on his own, vampirism notwithstanding.

“You’re just scared of being vulnerable,” Liam tells him on their next night out, after Harry’s gone on a long-winded tirade about how distasteful he finds the idea of a relationship.

It’s a ridiculous notion: him, _scared_. He can take on any human who tries anything—and they’d have to be human, he’s decided even though he has no intention of dating anyone—as well as most other vampires. He’s not stupid enough to let someone “break his heart” or anything; that’s juvenile. He’d never let his sense of self be so tied to one person that they could hurt him. That’s the whole point of being alone, minding his own business. He’s independent. He has his own self-worth and it doesn’t depend on anyone else.

There’s no longing in his eyes when he watches a man tenderly hold his girlfriend close to his side, no jealousy at her cheerful laughter as he whispers in her ear. Harry doesn’t care that they’re happy. _He’s_ happy. Content. Ambivalent, at the very least. He’s just been thrown by Liam’s comments because it’s been a while since he last took someone to bed. He resolves to fix that.

He goes out without Liam, picks an unassuming pub not too far from his flat. Usually he’d go for a club, somewhere dark and packed with people all with the same goal as him, but he feels a bit tired of that, thinks maybe it could be fun to pick up someone more challenging. Perhaps a pretty bartender or a businessman trying to unwind from the work day—someone who doesn’t intend to be charmed, who might play uninterested for a bit before falling at his feet. He won’t use his “natural” vampiric powers of seduction and enticement; it would be cheating, would ruin the game.

And it _is_ a game, ultimately. Entertainment. Playing with people until they give in.

He picks his target within five minutes of entering the establishment. There’s a man with bottle blond hair, his brown roots peeking through, sat at the bar and laughing obnoxiously with the bartender. Harry wants those absurdly skinny legs wrapped around his waist by the end of the night. He’s not entirely sure why, as there are at least two other people in the pub who could be considered more physically attractive than this young man Harry’s chosen, but nevertheless, he sidles up to the bar and claims the empty stool beside him.

Judging by the length of the stare he gets from the lad, this might go easier than planned.

“Hi,” he says in a casual sort of manner, as though he isn’t imagining the ways he’s going to ruin this man later. “I’m Harry.”

“Niall,” the blond grins, fortunately perfectly happy talking to a stranger.

“Louis,” the bartender cuts in dryly, breaking the heated eye contact Harry and Niall had engaged in unconsciously. “What’ll it be?”

“Peppermint Schnapps.”

Louis raises an eyebrow and Niall laughs, so Harry considers his order a success. His approach to Niall is to be a bit quirky, not exactly one of the lads but not exactly unapproachably weird either. He’s playing a bit like he remembers being when he was human, a gangly mortal stumbling along in life with a dimpled smile and jokes to share, no idea of what the future would hold. He wouldn’t have gone for someone like Niall back then, as it hadn’t been quite socially acceptable to chat up another bloke.

“What do you do?” Harry asks Niall, making sure to seem genuinely interested, leaning against the bar counter and turning his body to give off the impression that he’s completely tuned in to whatever Niall has to say.

“’m a sound engineer,” he replies, and then launches into a rambling explanation of what that means and how he loves music and wanted to be a singer but didn’t think he was quite good enough so he got into the behind-the-scenes bit of the industry and—

Harry’s kind of…actually enthralled. He takes in the lilt of Niall’s accent, the enthusiasm behind his words, the light in his eyes as he talks about something he clearly loves, and he’s not even minutely irritated by the innocent exuberance with which Niall talks about music. He tells the blond a story about singing with his mother when he was younger—a _true_ story, an honestly factual account of a real thing that happened to him, not a tale spun with a goal in mind.

He still wants to fuck Niall. Nothing has changed about that. He still intends to see what the other man looks like, his pale skin against Harry’s sheets. But there’s a little niggling thought in the back of Harry’s mind that says maybe he could give the morning after a try, that suggests perhaps taking Niall out on an actual date and seeing him as often as possible in all sorts of different contexts, not just with the intention of sleeping together.

“Last call, mates,” Louis cuts into their conversation hours later.

Harry frowns. He hasn’t made any real moves on Niall since his initial flirtatious grin, which means he’s as good as failed his mission. He’ll be going home to an empty bed.

It’s worth a shot, though. “Come back to my flat?” he offers, making it clear that he doesn’t mean for an amicable pot of tea.

Niall cackles—throws his head back and shakes with laughter so loud that the few patrons still left in the pub glare at them. Harry is a bit offended until Niall calms down enough to shoot him a teasing smile.

“Not going to bed with you on the first date, Styles. What sort of floozy do you take me for?”

Harry sniggers, but he doesn’t argue back. He doesn’t even protest the word “date”—doesn’t even point out that they arrived completely separately and were strangers half a day ago. He nods and lets Niall add his number to Harry’s phone with a little four-leaf clover and a heart next to his name. He hands his phone back over when Niall changes his mind and opts for the shamrock and one of the crying laughter emojis instead. Harry puts a rainbow of hearts next to his name in Niall’s phone because he can.

“Text me tomorrow?” Niall says, only slightly hesitantly.

Harry answers, “Of course,” and he means it whole-heartedly.

He doesn’t tell Liam. There is absolutely no reason he should have to deal with the self-satisfied “I told you so” he’d get if he did. Anyway, nothing has been proven. He’s made a friend that he’s sexually attracted to and who sends him ironic eggplant messages and demands that Harry take him to Nando’s for their second date.

Harry, an immortal being who feasts on the blood of living humans, acquiesces and takes Niall to Nando’s less than a week after their first meeting.

They meet up at the restaurant—and Harry uses that term loosely—just before sunset, which is convenient because it means Harry doesn’t have to wear a hat and sunglasses and two layers of sunscreen. He gets away with just the sunglasses and makes sure not to push up his sleeves to his elbows until they’re indoors. Niall immediately goes to order; Harry stutters out the first thing he sees on the menu for himself. They get a table near the back, secluded from the moderate amount of customers. Harry may or may not hook his foot around Niall’s and drag the blond’s legs across the divide so that their knees and calves touch. Niall blushes prettily and tries his best not to smile about it.

“How do you feel about second dates, then?” Harry puts forward cheekily as he passes over most of his chips to Niall.

Niall chews pensively. Harry will never admit it to anyone, but he’s a bit nervous that he’s crossed a line and will never be allowed to speak to Niall again. He mechanically slices and consumes his peri peri chicken and tastes nothing—not that his lack of taste is particularly due to anxiety, but instead the whole “vampire” thing. He can eat human food and does sometimes, to blend in, but it doesn’t do much for him.

“Not too scandalous, I think,” Niall finally announces. “Been on a proper date, haven’t we? Dinner, footsie under the table.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Yes, Harry. You can take me home.”

Harry has to be careful that he doesn’t show off his fangs in his excited smile. It wouldn’t do to scare Niall off. He hasn’t even begun to think about how to break the undead news, if he’s even going to. For all he knows, this thing with Niall will end tonight.

***

The nightclub scene hasn’t changed at all since the last time Harry visited such an establishment. It’s still a mess of strobe lighting and sweaty, scantily dressed people twitching to the bass of a generic dance hit. He hasn’t missed the heat, the headache, or the hassle of the hunt, hasn’t reminisced about the good old days of lurking in the crowd waiting to spot an easy target.

He has missed the pay-off, though, just a little. As much as he is pragmatic, there is something about bagged blood that puts him off. It’s too clean, too old, and leaves the taste of bleach in his mouth for hours. It’s convenient though, so he puts up with it. He can’t go out seducing young men and women when he’s got a boyfriend to be faithful to, thus why he’s been off fresh blood for nearly four months. Luckily when he made that decision he’d already known of a supplier for his new diet, one of those ethically-superior vampires who thought paying off blood banks to slip them their goods was somehow better than just going to the sources themselves. Harry may have had to sell his soul a bit, but Nick Grimshaw has always had a bit of a soft spot for Harry in the way that middle-aged women have one for Liam—ultimately, they want a strapping young man to fuck them. Even if Harry’s dick weren’t currently reserved for Niall, he still wouldn’t have given Nick more than a sultry look and maybe a glimpse of his defined torso because he’s not that desperate.

He feels a bit desperate looking around the club, however. Harry’s willpower is excellent, exercised and trained to resist the temptation of the walking meals around him all the time, but everyone has a limit and 120 days of processed food is apparently his. He already feels guilty for it, but not enough to change his mind. It’ll just be a little taste, just enough to take the edge off.

He chooses someone almost at random, ends up zeroing in on a skinny girl with fake tits and jet black hair. She’s ostensibly there with friends, only they’ve abandoned her at the bar while they join the mass of bodies on the dancefloor—easy to lead away unnoticed, but will be missed soon enough that someone will find her when Harry’s gone. He’s never liked leaving someone drained and unconscious without being reasonably sure that someone will come looking for them.

She goes with him without much work. He touches her hip and makes sure his eyes smolder with desire, and she lets him lead her out a rarely-used back door into an alley. He backs her against the wall and mouths at her neck; he has to work her up first, get her dazed with lust as well as the alcohol in her system so that she won’t really feel his fangs pierce her skin. Months ago he would’ve kissed her, let his hands wander from her hips to roam over her body. He keeps his palms flat against the wall and doesn’t even consider touching his lips to hers.

She’s just about delirious enough for him to bite when the door bangs open and someone wobbles outside. They shout something, presumably towards someone waiting for them inside the club. Something about fresh air, Harry thinks, but he could be wrong. His brain is shutting down, going into panic mode, because he knows that voice.

“Harry?”

Turning around is slow, pained. Harry’s face is riddled with guilt and misery; Niall’s is a mess of confusion and anguish which is very quickly hidden by fury. He turns on his heel and pulls the door back open, storming away before Harry can think of anything to say for himself. It takes several moments for Harry’s brain to come back online—as soon as it does, he rushes after his soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend.

Harry catches up to Niall on the street outside the building, where the blond is waiving his hand frustrated as he tries to catch the attention of passing taxis. Harry grabs him by the shoulders and pulls Niall around to face him.

“Niall-”

“Get off me!”

Harry doesn’t let go, even though he can feel his grip digging into Niall’s arms enough to leave bruises on his fair skin. He has to explain. He has to make Niall understand and forgive him. He _has_ to. It’s as important to him as breathing would be if he were still alive.

“It isn’t what it looks like,” he pleads.

Niall glares at him through a developing film of tears. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

“I swear.” Harry shakes Niall gently for emphasis. “Niall, I swear it’s not what you think.”

“What is it then, Harry? Because to me it looks like you’re a fucking cheater.”

“I-” The words get stuck in Harry’s throat.

What’s he meant to say? _“I’m a vampire”_? He wants Niall to forgive him, not think he’s both a cheating asshole and a heartless dick who would make a joke in this sort of situation. But beyond the truth, he has no other explanation for what Niall saw.

So he says “I’m a vampire” and waits.

Niall stares at him.

“What?”

“I’m a vampire.”

Niall’s face is blank. Harry can tell that he doesn’t really believe what he’s been told.

“No you’re not.”

Harry grimaces such that his fangs are helpfully on display. Niall flinches back, though he can’t go very far with Harry still holding his shoulders.

“Let me go,” Niall murmurs tonelessly.

Harry releases his grip and slowly lowers his arms. For the second time that night, he watches Niall walk away—only this time, he doesn’t follow.

He thinks about going out, picking up the first reasonably attractive person he sees, fucking them, and then repeating the process every night until the memory of Niall is washed from his mind. He thinks about buying a ticket to Africa and laying naked in the desert sun until he turns to dust. He thinks about slinking through the desolate streets of London and draining the life from everyone he passes.

In the end, he orders Italian. The garlic burns in his mouth and sets his throat on fire, which seems like a fitting punishment.

It’s just past four in the morning when he hears a knock. He wants to yell at Liam to go away, but he lost his voice at around the fifth piece of garlic bread, so he has to get up and answer the door if he wants the incessant banging to stop.

“Vampires aren’t real,” Niall asserts, almost aggressively, as he pushes past Harry and into the taller man’s flat.

Niall stands with his arms crossed, waits for Harry to close the door and turn around before he starts speaking again.

“You’re mental if you think you are one.”

Harry opens his mouth to reply. Niall cuts him off—essentially a blessing, as Harry isn’t actually able to articulate anything.

“Prove it,” he demands.

And then he tilts his head to the side so that the creamy white skin of his neck is on display. Harry hisses, shaking his head. He can’t bite Niall, can’t hurt him even if he’s pretty sure of his own ability to stop before any real damage could occur. The thought of his teeth marks scarred onto Niall’s neck makes him cringe—it’s also a bit arousing, if he’s honest, but that’s a thought he shuts down as soon as it makes itself known. He’s been extremely careful since they started their relationship, always making sure to keep control of himself and keep his fangs retracted and keep his strength at a regular human level. There have been close calls, moments in the throes of passion where he wanted to sink his teeth into Niall and taste the blood he could hear pumping erratically just under the Irishman’s skin, but he never gave in. He never wanted Niall to know that it was even a risk.

“Bite me, Harry,” Niall repeats his command, straining his neck further. “Or I’ll-” he blinks rapidly to try to defeat his tear ducts.

Harry doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do, how to make everything okay, so he gives in.

He steps up to Niall and rests his left hand gingerly on the blond’s waist. Harry’s right hand goes to support the other man’s head; he brushes his thumb against Niall’s cheek, catches his eyes and searches for absolute permission. It’s there—shaky, still disbelieving, but there.

His fangs fall naturally into place as Harry leans in towards Niall’s neck. He can hear Niall’s heart beating frantically and smell the tang of iron calling to him. Niall has always smelled tempting—it’s unclear whether he smells wonderful because Harry’s in love with him or if Harry was attracted to his scent in the first place; regardless, Harry presses his lips just above where Niall’s neck meets his shoulder. He bites.


End file.
